Tiny Town Satellite of Durham, N.C. – The view from here is that you yankee cops there in tiny town ain't doing nothing.

Last updated on Nov. 23, it has been impossible for the people to obtain any crime news in brief from the online department sites. We called the mayor but she was in the bathroom and couldn't be bothered. Later she had an aerobics class to teach then a massage.

She will out of touch for the remainder of her stay in office.

We know of one cop who will forever on duty be. Levi Spaulding. He is guarding the entrance to the History Center.

Good work! Without him there, time bandits will get in and rob us of our tiny memories.

But we think it's a little unfair to ask a dead man to work a holiday shift. Then again there's ain't no overtime in Hebbin.

Here in Durham, which is exactly like Tiny Town except they know how to preserve their downtown, have a sense of place and know how to dress up a parking garage without resorting to baby wah-wah art, here in Durham the police stick to the basics: writing tickets.

There is obviously some revenue stream here besides the universities and it must be tickets. But what's fun about the cops here is that they will write you a ticket for a traffic violation but you also have the choice, in court, of having a portion of a municipal ticket go to the local baseball team, The Durham Bulls.

Wouldn't it be progressive if we did the same in Tiny Town, for, say, the Ithaca Suffer Jets roller derby team? Or the Ithaca Lakers?

Do we still have a baseball team? I know our football team, well, most of them went back to jail after a shortened season.

Think about it, folks. We can gussy-up our parking garages, we can have a stadium for our own tiny town team ... We can ... Be Rebels. Why not? Ithaca City Hall and the like already make for a Confederacy of Dunces.

-- C. Penbroke Handy, round about and at large somewhere near the 36th parallel, undercover and overgrown ...